Comment by sgjohnson
6 days ago
But that is a bug in history. IPv6 was standardized BEFORE NAT.
“most what they know from IPv6” is just NAT.
> A less ambitious IPv4 is exactly what we need in order to make any progress
but we’re already making very good progress with IPv6? Global traffic to Google is >50% IPv6 already.
Current statistics are that a bit over 70% of websites are IPv4 only. A bit under 30% allow IPv6. IPv6 only websites are a rounding error.
Therefore if I'm on an IPv6 phone, odds are very good that my traffic winds up going over IPv4 internet at some point.
We're 30 years into the transition. We are still decades away from it being viable for servers to run IPv6 first. You pretty much have to do IPv4 on a server. IPv6 is an afterthought.
> We are still decades away from it being viable for servers to run IPv6 first.
Just put Cloudflare in front of it. You don’t need to use IPv4 on servers AT ALL. Only on the edge. You can easily run IPv6-only internally. It’s definitely not an afterthought for any new deployments. In fact there’s even a US gov’t mandate to go IPv6-first.
It’s the eyeballs that need IPv4. It’s a complete non-issue for servers.
"Just put Cloudflare in front of it"
Why do I have to get some third party involved??
Listen, you can be assured that the geek in me wants to master IPv6 and run it on my home network and feel clever because I figured it out, but there's another side of me that wants my networking stuff to just work!
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You have a point. But you still need DNS to an IPv4 address. And the fact that about 70% of websites are IPv4 only means that if you're setting up a new website, odds are good that you won't do IPv6 in the first pass.
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Pretty sure NAT was standardized before IPv6.
NAT is RFC 1631.
IPv6 is RFC 1883.
Admitted, that was very basic NAT.
RFC 1631 is a memo, not a standard.
Actually, my bad. NAT was NEVER standardized. Not only NAT was never standardized, it’s never even been on standards track. RFC 3022 is also just “Informational”
Plus, RFC 1918 doesn’t even mention NAT
So yes, NAT is a bug in history that has no right to exist. The people who invented it clearly never stopped to think on whether they should, so here we are 30 years later.
That doesn't really mean much. Basic NAT wasn't eligible to be on the standards track as it isn't a protocol. Same reason firewall RFCs are informational or BCP.
The protocols involving NAT are what end up on the standards track like FTP extensions for NAT (RFC 2428), STUN (RFC 3489), etc.
If only the inventors of NAT had patented it and then refused to license it!